NAGA CITY -- With a marginal population of 305 as of 1994 comprising 104 households, little has changed with the Agtas inhabiting Mt. Asog who remain to be nomadic even though they are now settled in the mountain villages of Santiago, San Nicolas, Sta. Teresita and Perpetual Help, all in Iriga City.

Caption: WOMAN & CHILD. The people of Mt. Asog remain nomadic, continue to practice kaingin and hold on to animistic belief in the 21st century.

        Introduced to Christianity with Christian names, the Agtas were organized and resettled by the National Commission for Indigenous People (NCIP) into tribes with chieftains elected upon enactment of the Indigenous People Rights Act of 1987 and awarded with Certificates of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT), an instrument that provides privileges to indigenous people (IP) to develop the areas considered as their habitat for generations.

        A finding of a study which was digested into a paper entitled “Hybrid Christianity in Oral Literature and Ethnobotany of the Agtas of Mt. Asog in the Bikol Region of the Philippines”, author Jesus Cyril M. Conde and a research team from the Ateneo de Naga University discovered that the Agtas here have not ceased from moving around the mountain in search of temporary domicile.

        According to the study, the Agtas continue to be nomadic as consequence of typhoons, personal conflicts and the practice of kaingin or slash-and-burn farming method.

        Conde said that these mountain people of Iriga City are still using a nomadic shelter design of a three-wall house with one opening made of easy-to-assemble-and-disassemble light materials like bamboo and nipa shingles.

        Conde explained the practice of nomadic life among Agta people is prevalent in the upper bounds of Mt. Isarog and for those who continue to practice kaingin, a farming method that destroys forest and wildlife. Kaingin requires forest clearing for the Agta to plant tubers or grains until grasses become unmanageable, signaling them to abandon the clearing and move on to another location in the forest.

        He said the Agtas move from one location to another in groups called kaabay, a cluster of households composed of relatives and friends living together and bound by a reciprocal-caring mechanism with elders as leaders.

Caption: PRESERVING the kaabay, a reciprocal caring mechanism, the Agtas move around Mt. Asog in groups of 3 to 7 households.

        The study also claimed that the Agtas are still believers of ethnobotany or the indigenous practice of learning and utilizing the qualities of plants to heal and ward off human predicaments from unseen elements that can possess human beings.

        Conde said the study unraveled the continuing beliefs in animism expressed in oral literature of the Agta people of Mt. Asog, who had been Christianized for generations.

        “They possess a hybrid form of Christianity dominated by indigenous and non-Christian beliefs,” he said, defining in academic terms the fusion of animistic and Christian beliefs on the daily life of an ordinary Agta.

        Prying on the perceived Christianized culture of Agta through key Agta informants, the AdeNU research team drew out a fundamental belief of an Agta world which is inhabited by animals and plants endowed with extra power that mortals can utilize as they co-exist, engage and relate with invisible elements around them.

        “The Bicol region is predominantly Christian due to its history as a part of Spanish colony. Yet, the Agtas believe in a reality in which indigenous culture overpowers Christianity. It is a cultural hybrid that shows the power and identity of Filipino post-colonial culture,” Conde asserted.

        The author, who earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy and Literature at the University of the Philippines and masteral degree in Literature and Cultural Studies at the Ateneo de Manila University, will present the paper on March 25-29 in Venice to the triennial conference of European Association for Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS).

        The EACLALS triennial conference is an academic event where literature and language studies from all over the world regarding theoretical freedom and liberties after the era of colonialism are presented and discussed in an international forum.